Traditionally, school systems and other educational entities have accessed and manipulated data that is stored and retrieved from a data store in connection with a hierarchical data model. Typically, the hierarchical data model is a rigid tree structure, in which the choice of a parent data set (for example, data corresponding to a school) is followed by the selection of a child data set (for example, data corresponding to a class) which stems from the previously-selected parent data set. Thus, a teacher or other school official who is preparing a report in accordance with the traditional data model, has severely limited options. For example, the teacher cannot select a particular class (e.g., 10th grade English), followed by a particular school, in the event the desired class is a child data set of a parent data set, which parent data set corresponds to the desired school.
Unfortunately, a method of building a report through the choice of items from element sets that correspond to a relational data model, which offers the ability to generate comparisons between elements in any selected data sets, and which allows data sets to be selected in any desired order, has eluded those skilled in the art until now.